Dear J.T. & Dale: After 15 years as a trial attorney, I am seeking to change careers, but I’m having difficulty getting my foot in the door. I updated my skills and then applied for jobs as a change-management analyst, corporate-compliance manager, contracts analyst, proposal writer, proposal-development coordinator and program manager, among others. – Regina J.T.: First, you seem to have adopted the “spray and pray†approach. Instead, I’d back up and really focus in on one or two career paths.
Dale: I know it’s counterintuitive, but here’s how it works, Regina: You increase your odds by decreasing the number of jobs in your target. You need to start developing a network, and that means working your net, as in fishing. Let’s extend that metaphor: Say you’re going to weave a net and you have a given amount of rope. If you make the net too big, it’s just a lot of giant holes, and the fish don’t even know it’s there. In a job search, your time is the rope, and if spread too wide, it’s just giant holes.
J.T.: You can start by picking a skill to leverage. For example, I recently met a former lawyer who’s now a magazine journalist. When I asked her why she opted to switch, she said her favorite part of being a lawyer was researching facts and persuading others to see a point of view. Being a reporter gave her that opportunity.
Dale: Once you focus on a skill, you next begin to leverage existing contacts. People are suspicious of those leaving successful careers, and especially suspicious of lawyers. People see your past career and wonder: “Will she be argumentative? Legalistic? Sue me if I make a joke?†Many businesspeople think of lawyers as the bully on capitalism’s playground.
That’s why the best way to transition into a new career is to find people who know you and your capacity to consistently deliver outstanding work, and ask them to help you find opportunities.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
It never gets any easier to change careers, but there do seem to be some common threads:
1) Decide what you like and want to keep about your present work.
2) Get involved with some new people in a new field that (you hope) will let you use these strengths and preferences. This involvement should be in a non-threatening, low-risk kind of way.
3) Use this involvement to test your assumptions before you bungee-jump off a bridge too far.
Your newspaper column about an administrative assistant with 10 years’
experience who wanted to escape the niche and land in museum work did miss one big possibility, which might also help the unhappy lawyer.
JT thought the drifting admin ought to hunt down a “person in charge of hiring” and find out what she really needs to do to get her dream career. Alas, if she were emotionally capable of that, she probably wouldn’t have been stuck in admin for a decade.
Dale warned her (correctly) that admins are bracketed so badly that baby steps may be required to escape…even crossing to an admin job in a museum. That would work, but it might not be necessary to go even that far–at first.
There’s a third way: Volunteer.
She’d get to see if work in a museum is really what she wants.
She might well be surprised at how tough an environment it is, with the emphasis on pursuing grants and donors while marketing expensive and demanding shows.
If she stays in love with the field anyway, she’d learn quickly about newly available jobs and be able to absorb a lot
from the other volunteers and staff members.
At the very least she’d be able to be at the museum on a regular basis, evenings or weekends, instead of parked in front of the TV obsessing over a dead-end admin job.
Checking her dream out and meeting people in the field would improve her quality of life a lot, with minimal risk.
I know several people who have overcome some truly terrible obstacles in the
job market–big resume gap, age, physical disability–with some
serious volunteering.
As for the lawyer, there isn’t a non-profit in the civilized world who wouldn’t be THRILLED to have a someone with a lawyer’s skills walk in the door to volunteer! Think about it: You can bet the rent that all non-profits have many more good intentions for proposals than they do proposal writers.
That very niche was one of the career options the lawyer was aiming for.
Pick a cause you love and go for it.
July 27th, 2014 at 10:36 pm
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